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graphic recordings done by Barb Siegel look2listen.com
DH For Newbies – Session 2 Room 210
- Newbies and Experts assemble to expand their horizons on DH
- Emilie Davis Diary (davisdiaries.villanova.edu/) started as a small class project for transcription and developed into the website and they learned as they go
- Great learning tool is networking, if you do not know or your university/school does not have a DH center there are many out there to help you along the way
- How to gain visibility for those independent scholars who dont have a website ending in .edu
- dirt.projectbamboo.org/ great resource for people who do not have knowledge of a technology service to do (______)
- dhcommons.org/ collaborate and resources to help you advance your project
- Besides these great websites DH has a community on twitter #DH #digitalhumanities, find people and follow them, tweet them, follow conversations
- Biggest thing is to have a project to work on to keep your skills sharp…the old adage if you dont use it you lose it is true for DH
- Hard to visualize version 1.0 when you see a finalize project…how to translate ideas to very rough beta version
- Is the project useful only now or forever…who will upkeep it…how will it look and be used when the technology changes???? (Dont Worry About It – Expert)
- Projects do not have to be large things that need grant money…you can start small and build upon it
- Academics should take “risk” and put things out there in DH even if its a WordPress Site
- Technology and coding is scary but there are tutorials out there to help you
- Paper –> Digital transition might take time but imagine use for Control “F” to search for names, topics, etc etc
- Networking through social media: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, etc
- Google Ngram is another great tool
- fromzerosandones.wordpress.com/ is another great website
- I dont know is okay…learn from mistakes…admitting what you do not know is okay to grow
Entrepreneur Fishbowl – Session 1 Room 210
○ Examples of cultural entrepreneurship
○ What is cultural entrepreneurship?
○ How do we connect from the nitty gritty of research and artifacts to the
Amnesty house has strong ties to France and the French embassy
□ Used their connections and relations with France to create
Pi day was created by a woman history tour guide for einstien’s
birthday
□ Recruited local pie shops and bakeries to get in on the action
□ Now a national phenomenon
Using information reservoirs like archives to connect local
businesses and bring money to the community
DC especially has a big connection to local history
□ Ex Ghost of DC blog, Ben’s Chili Bowl
creatively using local history and archives to find new ways to raise
money
Thinking outside of the box, instead of using larger entities for
funding things like museums(federal government) using cool local
tours or looking smaller and appealing to individuals
DC museums feel more egalitarian
□ Partly because they’re free
Across the cultural heritage sector, a lot of people either don’t have
artifacts or won’t give them up
general public?
Broadcasting‐Storycore by the Library of Congress, helped by NPR
Crowdsourcing‐instead of looking for a few large donors, find a lot
of small donors
Huricane digital memory bank‐handed out mardi gras cups with
their website on it
Difficult to locate a core of enthusiasts
□ Easier to find lincoln enthusiasts as opposed to james
□ Perhaps a lack of crossover between enthusiasts and those
□ Depends how interconnected a subject is
French themed events to bring in money
buchanan enthusiasts
who would share their research
Ex. Lincoln is connected to the civil war and both are
large interest groups
○ How can museums and culture insittutions make money off of these
○ Using social media and internet culture to educate
New York Public Library Menu project
□ Entirely crowdsourced, really took off
events?
Auction off some artifacts, talk up digital collections during
Look for “little pots of money” to make them yours
□ Find an enthusiast who also works in digital collecttions or
Using something like kickstarter has the same issue with finding
large donors, only targets a specific audience (digitally literate and
old rich people respectively)
Identify an audience and go to where they are (forums, meetings,
websites)
Using hashtags and youtube videos to supplement education in the
classroom
“If you’re interested in X, check out the #X to see videos and articles
all about it”
Democratization of education
□ Using MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses)
web design, get them to work for you as a side project
□ Ceded the term entrepreneur to the business and science
Huge classes with 90% fail rates
Lack of feedback and face to face engagement
Used as a way for universities to cut costs and faculty
world
Not just about financial value, entrepreneurship is a way
to do new things in brand new ways
May not make millions of dollars, but can be used to
better the world through education
Humanities teaches imagination, how to seek
opportunity and build on unexpected consequences
Digital Publishing – Room 208 Session 1
- Post colonial literature in multi-lingual forms
- Limited access to sources in countries especially for Western scholars
- Database created, however, dated and needs updating
- There are gaps in graphs and data due to lack of these papers in other languages
- Instead of rebuilding wheel with MLA seeing how it can be adapted to this database
- Making works digital or…
- Primary sources get ignored
- Balance between primary and secondary sources
- One shouldn’t lag behind the other
- How is this looked at world wide…open access journal vs the old school (even though there is peer reviewed)
- Impact Factors – number of citations and prestige of the journal
- People assume a lower impact factor to open access…anyone can publish etc etc
- Times are changing and academy can be viewed as a business vs institution, access is easier with internet and tagging those who want the knowledge will find it
- Scholarship is becoming digital what are the additions that help…dont get rid of the old but defiantly add the new
- Highers up in university point fingers at who do not want to accept digital scholarship, whether it is deans/provost or department chairs
- People sometimes judge articles by impact factors and may not even read them…where is the scholarly-ness in that
- Sharing abstracts in english of other language articles very helpful…what about for less academic purposes translate.google.com???
- Digital humanities should not be technophobic
- Besides language somethings do not translate well such as occupation classification and colloquialisms
- To Be Continue….
Dork Short Notes
That Camp Council
- Grant money ran out = YAY?!?
- Lets make That Camp sustainable and long lasting
- The council was created to be a support system
- Forums to help other
- Keep on creating and developing That Camp
- It’s a living being….
National Endowment for the Humanities Dork Short – Office of Digital Humanities
- Grants and how to leverage resources
- www.neh.gov
- Jefferson Lecture coming up @ Kennedy Center
- Database of Funded Projects (great starting place)
- Professional Development Opportunities
DH Now
- A Collaborative weekly “crowd source” publication
- Follow 700 RSS feeds (“that’s a lot”)
- Web publication that picks 2-4 pieces a week
- Nominate more RSS feeds (as if 700 wasn’t a lot)
- We love volunteers do not need to be an expert
Remembering Lincoln
- First Ford Theater project (150 yrs post Assassination)
- Bringing together primary assassination of people’s reactions
- Make a national event more localized
- They cannot search social media #1865problems
- People are uploading their sources and helping expand their stories
- Some items are already on the map, go check it out
- More than institutions and private collectors, regular people are helping
National Digital Stewardship
- Combine theory and practice of digital curation
- Great opportunities to combine people with programs
The Zombie Archive
- Scholars and lover of zombies can go and find it all (Zombie Walmart)
- Data mining, more archive creation
- Map to track outbreak and creatures
- Lets grow this and develop this more
Entrepreneurship
- Online collection of articles
- Sorry for this dork short note being so short, was having some technical difficulties at the time 🙁
Sunlight Foundation
- A quick look at tools and projects that Sunlight provides
- Mostly government tools and data
- Very cool charts and maps
- Lots or archiving and moving forward
Social Network Analysis
- NSA knowledge to Classic History knowledge
- Using the tools to track terrorist post 9-11 being brought over to history
- Seeing who knows who in Ancient History
- Alexander the Great knew who and who was a central hub of people besides him
- Great visualization for readings and primary sources to see who knows who, whether they are male/female, ethnicities, rank, location
- Can be used for any people…Socrates, Plato, or more modern perhaps
- (“Bernstein and Woodward using this for the Watergate break-in????”)
207 Session 1: Sunlight Foundation: Data Visualization
Amy Ngai, Amy Cesal, Ben Chartoff
– “Make gov transparent and accountable through data, tools, policy and journalism”
– free, open-source; staff of designers social scientists, reporters, policy, developers, comms
– sunlightfoundation.com/api/community: projects to assist with!
What not to do:
– Data can be pretty, but does it SHOW anything
– No key, no introductory texts, no clear message of the data
– “Number art” pretty, but doesn’t tell you information
– No scales, labels, titles
“Data pervs”
– Notion that something is pretty, so it must “mean” something
– But this can mean that just because something is aesthetically appealing, people might not look deeply into it/question it
– “WTF Visualizations: Visualizations that make no sense” Tumblr page
“Squint test”
– Graphics that tell the story on the first glance
e.g. informative headlines, notable images like red lines indicating increase/decrease
– Use context: what are themes that people commonly understand? E.g. take numerical data and put it in the context of how it would fill a football field
^ most people have an estimate of the size of a football field; makes abstract data more accessible
Disseminating data
– Reporters can take screenshots of data graphics
– Reporting for reporters; making it more bite-sized for reporters to quickly understand information
– Social media shares
TOOLS:
Maps
– Show geospatial trends e.g. where are political fundraisers happening?
– www.mapbox.com
The R Project
– Data visualization coding tool online
– R-project.org
Tableau
– Basic coding
Developers/Coders:
– github.com/sunlightlabs
Sunlight Foundation Data Visualization Style Guide
Be open to and flexible with whatever tools are available! If it gets the job done, use it
DH in the classroom (digital pedagogy)
Group Bibliographies
– annotated bibliographies
– shared bibliographies (e.g., through Zotero)
Transcriptions
– permanency
– skill-neutral
DH SHOW & TELL
What are some useful tools for academic research?
TurboScan
Pocket
Evernote
Perseus.Tufts.edu
Prezi
Newsdiffs
Dropbox
SpiderOak
Carbonite
MediaFire
Lynda.com (tutorials)
PDF Expert
Writecheck
Safeassign
Room 210, Session 4: Creating Crowd Sourcing Transcription for oral and video history
– Smithsonian transcriptions
– Crowdsourcing: cost efficient
– Question: how do you translate this to oral and video history?
– Video history: a lot of it is restricted, but some examples of video content:
– Manhattan Project
– Small arms history (including history of AK-47)
– Take reel-to-reel material on digital recorders
– Audio cassettes
– Sent to contractor to be transcribed
– Funds: sketchy
Challenges of oral transcriptions:
– Ensuring accuracy: accents, misheard words
– Tedious: pause, rewind, play, pause, rewind, play, repeat…
How do we accommodate for these problems?
– becomes more manageable if you break it up into segments: 30 seconds every 10 minutes
^ improves accuracy
– in a crowdsource context, divide it up by time stamps and assign people minute blocks
– recognizable people and recordings: entices people to participate
– have a notes portion: people can make notes of time stamps and confusion about language understanding
– But if there are unknown figures, contextualize them: e.g. why was this person important to xyz movement? How did this person influence xyz public figure?
– time stamps: makes it really clear where a project stopped
– tools to slow down speech
Potential tools:
– iTunes, Express Scribe, YouTube, iMovie (Mac; can alter pitch, speed, tone)
Data visualization:
– If you get demographics of digital volunteers, you can map where they are and what content they tend to be interested in
^ future donors and fundraisers can come from this
Why do you transcribe oral histories?
– Accessibility
– data mining: make it accessible to new research techniques
– social network analysis: transcribe and make conclusions about relationships
– preservation: if it’s recorded on a cassette or something that might be hard to digitize, you have the words forever
^ also an argument for keeping cassettes and similar media; notion that this is valuable oral content
Is there a way to build an online tool where once an oral history exists online, it can automatically enter a data mining program?
– there should be a way once an oral history is approved, you can send it directly through a code which submits it in a data context
– could be multistep, but you could build a single online forum for it
Failure is success: you rule out dead ends and apply it to your next effort